Dell said on Wednesday it intended to acquire a Connecticut-based provider of cloud-based medical archiving services InSite One for an undisclosed amount. The buyer plans to combine Insite One's archive software and storage services with its Unified Clinical Archive solution to provide the healthcare industry with a cloud-based HIPAA-supporting storage offering.

Dell's existing storage services for the healthcare industry include design and deployment of in-house storage and archiving systems. The acquisition, giving Dell a storage-as-a-service platform, will extend these services into the cloud.

James Coffin, vice president of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, said the company's healthcare customers have said that growing requirements for digital imaging and patient records was at the top of their list of concerns.

"We are dramatically simplifying archiving and retention of clinical data, both medical images and electronic medical records," he said in a statement.

Presently, InSite One manages about 55m clinical studies, more than 3.6bn medical images and supports about 800 clinical sites, according to a Dell news release.

Dell quoted ESG Research in forecasting that medical image data in North America would grow more than 35% by 2014, reaching about 2.6m terabytes total.